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At Trehgam, a tiny hamlet in the Kupwara district of Jammu & Kashmir, where Mohammed Maqbool Butt, son of Ghulam Qadir, a tailor, was born 46 years ago, no shop opened for four consecutive days last fortnight.

In Anantnag district, at the southern end of Kashmir, a group of youngsters, tears welling from their eyes, went round the schools, banks and government offices, requesting the authorities to close down. At Zainakadal, in the heart of thickly-populated old Srinagar, the streets were deserted even though nobody had given the call for a bandh.

"Life in the valley is perfectly normal," read the peppy announcement by the Jammu & Kashmir Government hours after the execution of Butt on February 11 in Tihar Jail in distant New Delhi, for having committed a murder 18 years ago.

But Butt's hanging, deferred for obvious political reasons since his rearrest (after his escape in December 1968) in 1976, and then carried out with unseemly haste within three days of the President rejecting his mercy petition, created much more than ripples in the valley of poplars and maples.

To many Kashmiris unconnected with politics, the hanging smacked of pointless revenge. The provocation was all too apparent: Ravindra Mhatre, an Indian diplomat in Birmingham, being kidnapped supposedly by armed Kashmiri secessionists between February 3 and February 5, and Butt's fate being decided on February 8.

No one in Kashmir had gloated over Mhatre's killing, but Butt wore the halo of a martyr almost overnight. The convoluted phraseology of the years of the plebiscite movement was back again in the tea-shops, the coffeehouses and the street squares.

Farooq Abdullah with hijacker Ashraf Qureshi in Pakistan in 1974

Abdul Ghani Lone, MLA and chairman of the People's Conference, a party that seeks greater autonomy for Jammu & Kashmir without calling into question the state's accession to India in 1947, summed up the situation: "Maqbool is the first martyr on the question of Kashmir's accession. The Centre and the Government headed by Farooq Abdullah have made a martyr out of him."

Troubled Valley: It was Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, facing relentless Congress(I) attacks ever since he was elected last June, who had more to fear from Butt's ghost stalking the valley. For his National Conference (NC), the hanging was a body blow to its reputation of being able to control secessionist sentiments.

Sitting in the chief minister's bungalow at Jammu, where the capital shifts in winter, Farooq was visibly worried. "The secessionists and the fundamentalists should be dealt with politically, and that's the only way to fight them. Retaliation doesn't pay," he said.

Intelligence reports had reached him that at a gayebana janaza (funeral prayer) for Butt held in Srinagar on the day of his execution, slogans had been raised against both Mrs Indira Gandhi and Farooq for their "complicity" in the hanging.

Quite shaken by the pace of events, Farooq cancelled his scheduled programme of visiting the Kashmir valley on February 11. Ghulam Nabi Butt, Maqbool's brother, was whisked away by state CID men from the Srinagar airport minutes before he was to leave for New Delhi to witness the execution and claim the body.

Lost Opportunity: The state Government could have bought time for Butt. As he was also being tried in Kashmir for the murder of a bank manager at Lunget in 1976, soon after his re-entry into India, the state Government could have taken the plea that Butt's hanging on the basis of his earlier death sentence (for the 1966 murder) would obstruct justice in the second case.

But no such plea was taken. When P.P. Nayyar, special secretary in the Union Home Ministry, flew down to Jammu following the President rejecting Butt's mercy petition, the state prosecution authorities, without demur, petitioned Enemy Agents' Judge Pavitar Singh Bhardwaj to sign the "black warrant".

"It was basically a convention of the Plebiscite Front. At that time
we were all trying to find a solution to the Kashmir problem. It is a
fact that I met many Kashmiri militants at that time, I even met Maqbool Butt there-at Bagh, a small town in the Pakistan-occupied part of
Poonch. He was with me when I shook hands with villagers. I found him to he a romantic-like Che Guevara."

Farooq Abdullahabout his 1974 visit to Pakistan

Instead, it was Lone's party, totally opposed to the NC, which took upon itself the task of defending Butt. Muzaffar Hussein Beg, second-in-command of the People's Conference, appeared before a bench of the Supreme Court at the eleventh hour for stay of the execution.

Beg, it was reported, was helped by Ghulam Nabi Hagroo, another leading lawyer and an important rukun (member) of the Jamait-e-Islami, to draft the petition. The Anantnag demonstrations were reportedly led by the People's League, a small organisation which operates mostly underground and derives inspiration from across the line of actual control.

These parties bore the brunt of precautionary arrests: over 400 of the supporters of Jamait-e-Islami, the rabidly fundamentalist Jamait-e-Tulaba, the Mahaz-e-Azadi and the People's League were picked up by the police.

The Congress(I) leaders of the state had reason to celebrate: Farooq, their arch enemy, was for the first time in danger of being condemned by the mainstream of Kashmiri Muslim opinion which vigorously supports the Kashmiri infaradiyat (identity), suspects that the "Indians" have designs on it, and votes the NC to power believing that it alone can safeguard it.

Despite Farooq's repeated protestation that "I'm an Indian and I'll die an Indian", the Kashmiri Muslims regard him as a crusader for their cause just as his late father was a crusader. Whereas the Sheikh had the advantage of his personality to keep the militancy in Kashmir society under check, it broke out all too often into the open during the 17 months that Farooq succeeded his father as chief minister.

Disturbing Incidents: The first time that the militants raucously asserted their presence was at the Independence Day parade at the main stadium in Srinagar where, while Farooq was taking the salute, a crude bomb went off.

It came to the boil again in October when the one-day cricket match between India and the West Indies was nearly abandoned as agitating hordes broke through the fencing, pelted Indian players with stones and tried to dig up the wicket.

Earlier, there were stray scenes of jubilation in various parts of Srinagar on August 14, Pakistan's Independence Day. There was also an attempt to blow up a transmission tower on top of Srinagar's Hari Parbat with high explosives.

These are stray incidents in comparison with the torrent of violence in neighbouring Punjab, but the state Government took an all too leisurely view of it. The stadium case was registered at Shergari police station while the cricket ground case was handled by Kothibagh police station, both in Srinagar.

Shafi Qureshi: Murky past

For months, investigation shuttled between the two police stations and the team. Meanwhile the Union Home Ministry began an independent inquiry into the incidents. The Congress(I) simultaneously intensified propaganda that Farooq had been sheltering secessionists, and the unsolved cases became grist to their mill.

A vocal section of the Congress(I) leadership meanwhile made out an elaborate case for Farooq's dismissal on this ground: they took the unprecedented step of two Muslim members of the Union Council of Ministers, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Arif Mohammed Khan, taking a deputation to the President requesting him to dismiss Farooq.

Finally, after a crucial meeting with Mrs Gandhi on January 26, Farooq ordered a wave of detentions in the Kashmir valley - some on specific charges, others under the Public Safety Act. Beginning from January 27, virtually the entire top leadership of the Jamait-e-Islami, the Jamait-e-Tulaba, the Mahaz-e-Azadi and the People's League were swept up by the police dragnet.

A sizeable number of the militants went underground. However, it is only in the Independence Day bomb case that the police had been able to make a breakthrough earlier. Four persons arrested in this connection were Iqbal Qureshi, Altaf Qureshi, Altaf Mahajan and Majid Lala. Police officials say that at least two of them have "interesting connections". Examples:

Iqbal is the brother of Hashim Qureshi, hijacker of the Indian Airlines Fokker Friendship Ganga in 1971 and a leader of the Jammu & Kashmir National Liberation Front (JKNLF) (known as the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front in England); and

Altaf Qureshi is the brother of Ashraf Qureshi, co-hijacker of Ganga.

"This made us sit up for a while," says an official in Srinagar, "because it became clear that the JKNLF had been able to maintain its links here." Later, when Mhatre's kidnappers attempted a half-hearted negotiation by circulating their demands among the media, they wanted the "release" of Iqbal, Altaf Qureshi and Lala - not knowing that both Altaf and Lala were out on bail.

However, among the leaders arrested or detained after January 27 were: Shaifuddin Qari, secretary of the Jamait-e-Islami; Syed Ali Shah Gilani, ex-MLA of the Jamait; Mohammed Farooq Rehman, president of the People's League; and at least 50 second-rank leaders of the Jamait, the Jamait-e-Tulaba, the Mahaz-e-Azadi and the People's League. The pattern of the arrests revealed a blend of half-heartedness and overkill.

The Jamait-e-Islami people formed the majority of those held even though their participation in recent militant activities was nil. On the other hand, the police could not apprehend the three loudest champions of Kashmiri separatism, such as:

Shabir Ahmed Shah, the People's League leader, whose name figures repeatedly in the interrogation reports of Maqbool Butt as his accomplice. Shah is an accused in the cricket match case;

Bashir Ahmed Butt, main organiser of the Mahaz-e-Azadi; and

Tajumul Islam, chief of the Jamait-e-Tulba which, like the Mahaz-e-Azadi, publicly opposes Kashmir's accession into India.

However, by ordering the arrests, visibly under pressure from the Centre, Farooq drew flak from within Kashmir as he had never done before. Earlier, when the Congress(I) was gunning for him both within and outside the state, he could always turn for succour to the hard core Kashmiri Muslim society.

But, by giving in to Central pressure, Farooq became almost a co-accused. "The Centre and Farooq Abdullah are together defaming the Muslims of Kashmir," said Lone in the state Assembly. "I have full confidence in myself and my own people," said Farooq.

Controversial Past: But the noose seemed to be tightening around him all the same. On one hand, militant groups and their leaders, who were - according to a police officer - "not even known to their neighbours till the other day", became household names in the valley overnight.

On the other hand, the all-India image of Farooq as a champion of Kashmir's integration into India suffered a rude jolt as the Congress(I), barely concealing its glee, began ferreting out evidence of his earlier association with the JKNLF and other secessionist groups.

Some of the facts about Farooq's (and the Abdullah family's) close association with the secessionist movement in Kashmir are bound to be uncomfortable now. For example, Mohammed Shafi Qureshi, former Union minister, mentioned immediately after Mhatre's kidnapping that Farooq had addressed a meeting at Srinagar's Lal Chowk in 1974 with Amanullah Khan.

Farooq told INDIA TODAY: "I don't remember if Amanullah Khan was present." But he was unduly coy, because Amanullah Khan had been permitted by the Union Government in 1974 to go round Kashmir and suggest a solution to the Kashmir dispute.

Said Moulvi Farooq, mirwaiz of Kashmir and the chief minister's controversial ally: "Both Dr Farooq Abdullah and Amanullah Khan had visited my house in 1974. This was with the permission of the Government of India. What's wrong with that?"

Nothing except that Farooq is still trying hard to live down the fact that until the Kashmir Accord of 1975, when the Sheikh and Mrs Gandhi "settled" the Kashmir problem with the former fully agreeing to the 1947 accession of the former princely state - total area including Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK) 222,000 sq km - the family, including Farooq, had been preaching rai shumari, or plebiscite.

As late as 1974, Farooq was invited to Pakistan by the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who organised a lavish reception for him in POK. At a public rally in Mirpur, one of the main towns of POK, he shared the podium with none other than Ashraf Qureshi, the hijacker belonging to JKNLF.

Says Farooq about his 1974 visit to Pakistan: "It was basically a convention of the Plebiscite Front. At that time, we were all trying to find a solution to the Kashmir problem. It is a fact that I met many Kashmiri militants at that time. I even met Maqbool Butt there - at Bagh, a small town in the Pakistan-occupied part of Poonch. He was with me when I shook hands with villagers. I found him to be a romantic - like Che Guevara."

Congress Record: But for the Congress(I) it is merely the pot calling the kettle black. Shafi Qureshi, for instance, led the fanatical fringe of the student organisations in Kashmir in 1947 which supported the military invasion from Pakistan.

In that year, he founded the "Pakistan Students' Federation" in Kashmir. In 1951, he became an important worker of Political Conference, led by Mohiuddin Kara, which preached Jammu & Kashmir's 'de-accession' from India and accession to Pakistan.

The state CID report (10865/CID) of September 12, 1955, details the activities of Shafi Qureshi, by then the vice-president of Political Conference, aimed at "encouraging secessionist activities" and "advocating the cause of Jammu & Kashmir merging in Pakistan".

Finally, by a cabinet order (IS-93-D/56) on September 22, 1956, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, the erstwhile prime minister of the state who is regarded by present-day Congressmen as a "nationalist", got Shafi Qureshi detained under the Preventive Detention Act.

Moulana Iftikhar Mohammed Hussein Ansari, the leader of the Congress(I) Legislature Party now, and a strident critic of Farooq for leading the state to the brink of secession, was the founder of Shia Youth Federation, an adjunct of the Plebiscite Front led by Sheikh Abdullah and the late Mirza Afzal Beg.

The Shias of Srinagar still remember his fire-eating speeches every year on youm-e-siah (Black Day), or August 9, the day in 1953 when the Central Government moved into action to arrest Sheikh Abdullah and replace him with Bakshi as the prime minister of the state.

Strong Currents: The reality of the Kashmir situation till 1975 was that, except for a few trusted families - like the Bakshi family, the Sadiq family and Syed Mir Qasim, chief minister till 1975 - and Mufti Mohammed Syed, a conscious integrationist and the present president of the state Congress(I), the Congress at the Centre had no real ally in the Kashmir valley.

The war cry of the valley was plebiscite, and the messiah was the Sheikh. Says Bakshi Bashir, son of the Bakshi and a businessman unconnected with politics: "It is an undeniable fact that when the Kashmiris said plebiscite in those days, they meant independence."

The Sheikh rode to power playing on these emotions and using them though not necessarily softening them. By the sheer strength of his personality, he could order an arrangement in Kashmir society where those who were regarded as secessionists till the other day could be rehabilitated without any stigma attached.

The Al Fatah conspirators, for instance, were well settled after the Sheikh had withdrawn the case against them. Gradually, a system was about to emerge when those who had sought, independence for Jammu & Kashmir could get evenly distributed on two sides of the new fence, as the ruling party and the opposition.

For the Sheikh, the period following his re-assumption of power in Jammu & Kashmir in 1975 was marked by a long tightrope walk. In 1977, when the Janata Party at the Centre thought that it could take on the Sheikh on his home, he mobilised his people again in the slogan of Kashmiri identity being in peril, and won a decisive victory. With Mrs Gandhi's return, the two leaders marked off their territories and were on their way to hammer out a workable arrangement for cooperation.

Farooq took over the helm at this crucial juncture in Kashmir's chequered history, when the Sheikh had initiated the psychological process of the state's integration into India but had not yet completed it. The Jamait-e-Islami, the Jamait-e-Tulaba, the Mahaz-e-Azadi and the People's League were subdued by the Skeikh's popularity - but they were obviously biding their time.

But perhaps the biggest stumbling block in the way of the urban Kashmiris' identification with the masses in India (Muslim population: 11 crore in 1981) was Moulvi Farooq's outfit, operating from the sprawling Jama Masjid on the outskirts of Srinagar: a massive edifice built on 28 kanals of land, and raised on 380 deodar poles. More than 50,000 people can assemble in the central congregation hall of the masjid.

The moulvi's ancestors, preachers from Iran who had accompanied Mir Syed Ali Hamadani, the man who converted the Kashmiris to Islam 600 years ago, moved from their settlement at Tral into Srinagar and were housed at Mirwaiz Manzil in Srinagar 200 years ago. The Dogra rulers of Kashmir, ever eager to have a Kashmiri Muslim leader to deal with, invested the mirwaiz with an aura for their own convenience.

In 1931, Yusuf Shah, the then mirwaiz, formed the Muslim Conference with the Sheikh, then an obscure teacher at a school in Soura, his birthplace 25 km from Srinagar. In 1938, the mirwaiz and the Sheikh parted company as the Sheikh wanted the organisation to be renamed National Conference. As the NC slid more and more towards a collision with the maharajas, the house of the mirwaiz got increasingly hostile towards the Sheikh.

The present mirwaiz belongs to a generation of political priests. His uncle, Yusuf Shah, walked across to poicin 1947, never to return. A strong advocate of Jammu & Kashmir's accession to Pakistan, Yusuf became president of POK twice, in 1950 and in 1961. Yusuf, who died in Muzaffarabad in 1968 at the age of 66, was a rabid India-hater.

But, more than that, he hated the Sheikh. Even Jawaharlal Nehru tried to use him once when he gave Yusuf permission to enter India in 1958. He crossed the Wagah border and waited at Amritsar for clearance to enter Kashmir. But Bakshi, always suspicious of potential rivals, did not let him enter his state.

Basic Differences: Moulvi Farooq became the mirwaiz in 1961 when he was only 17 and yet to imbibe Quranic lore in full. But he was quick to realise the political importance of his seat. With the Sheikh in prison, and a power vacuum in the state, the moulvi formed his Awami Action Committee in 1963 with a strong slogan of de-accession from India and with a subtle tilt towards accession to Pakistan.

The basic difference between the Sheikh and the moulvi was on the question of this tilt: the Sheikh, at that stage, simply demanded for the people of the state the right to decide their own fate.

G.M. Shah, the Sheikh's son-in-law and a close confidant for 40 years, who was expelled from the party by Farooq last year and is now triggering dissent within the party, is right when he says: "The moulvi is a walking negation of all the values that the Sheikh stood for. The Sheikh wanted him to remain a mere religious figure, and reduced him to the leader of a few back-lanes of Srinagar."

However, last April, when talks between the NC and the Congress(I) for an electoral understanding broke down, Farooq was in frantic need of allies in the state's 'Islamic' lobby. He took a rather drastic step by enlisting the moulvi's support. Hindu opinion in Jammu rallied entirely against Farooq as a result of this alliance.

But its long-term effect was felt later when the Congress(I) as well as Farooq's recent detractors within the family, brother Tariq Abdullah, 46, and Shah, used it as a stick to beat Farooq.

Shifting Friendships: The chief minister had obviously met the moulvi more than half-way because, though the moulvi benefited from the alliance, he was not prepared to do anything by which the communal stigma on him could be lessened.

He recently toured south India where he addressed a series of public meetings, fulminating against the Centre in speeches, which, however, were carefully couched in secular idioms. But, as regards the accession of Jammu & Kashmir, he has not changed his mind. When asked specifically about his views his terse reply was: "I don't want to discuss the subject."

Flowever, the Congress(I) has little moral right to criticise the moulvi because it had tried hard to befriend him ever since it returned to power at the Centre in 1980. The moulvi recalls that Rajiv Gandhi, accompanied by Vijay Dhar, his friend and son of the late D.P. Dhar, had visited his palatial house near Nagin Lake as late as 1982.

In September 1980, the Congress(I) Government had even done him a special favour: by an order of the Income Tax Department, donations to his massive Anjuman-i-Nusratul Islam trust (1981-82 budget: Rs 11.41 lakh) was exempted from income tax under the special section 80G of the Income Tax Act (No. CIT/HG/ASR/1/28/-A/5045 dated Septenber 11, 1980).

The curious aspect of the order was that the exemption was granted to the trust without checking his accounts and for three years up to March 31, 1983.

Soon after the exemption period ended, however, it became clear that the moulvi would turn down offers of alliance with the Congress(I). As the NC-Moulvi Farooq alliance got going, the Congress(I) true to its style, issued another letter through the Income Tax Department (No. 595 dated January 5, 1984) asking him to produce his books of account and explain why the exemption should not be withdrawn.

Old Ghosts: The politics of Kashmir valley is one tiresomely long chronicle of convenient alliances and dissimulation. Cutting across all party lines, the patriots of today were almost invariably the patrons of secession in the past. Nor is there any assurance that they will not turn a full circle later.

The 1975 accord was the expression of the tired old Sheikh's desire to regain the control levers - at a price which nobody knows if the people were prepared to pay. The basic issue - whether the Kashmiri Muslim would like to be ruled by New Delhi - was merely swept under the carpet.

"Only time and patience," says a former adviser to the prime minister, himself a Kashmiri, "can heal the wounds of the state." But Mrs Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and their associates in the state are in no mood to allow Farooq any breathing space at all.

And, being inexperienced in politics, Farooq is liable to take the wrong steps and to press the panic button to summon the genie of communalism. But only the Sheikh knew how to put the genie back in the bottle.

As the winter snow recedes from the peaks of Pir Panjal, there is a fear of politics in the valley hardening along communal lines. Fundamentalist groups are already active in the campuses of colleges and universities, in seemingly innocuous social organisations, even among government staff.

There is also encouragement from the other side of the line of actual control. In the event of Farooq being dislodged, it is this section that will reap the benefits. Mrs Gandhi will then bear the responsibility of unleashing strange demons on the scene without knowing how to recall them.

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